From the perspective of subsequent books and texts by Richard Rorty it can be clearly seen that to have a look at his anti-Platonism and anti-essentialism, it is not enough to read either only Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, or only Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Consequences of Pragmatism and both volumes of Philosophical Papers. For me it turns out that the impression given by various readings of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in Reading Rorty - the first serious (...) collected volume devoted to the American pragmatist - is totally misleading, or at least extremely one-sided. The book, it is claimed there, is merely criticism of traditional epistemology carried out on the grounds of American analytic philosophy not too interesting to a wider public (and, possibly, a loose project of philosophy as "conversation", some of them add). And yet it can only be seen retrospectively that the book provides most interesting philosophical "foundations" to later, often more metaphilosophical, literary and cultural ideas. To put it in a nutshell: one can find there the idea of solidarity and self-creation, there is the fundamental question about the place of philosophy in culture rather than merely that about the place of epistemology in philosophy; as well as there is a question about the future of the philosopher in culture, about mechanisms of production and collapse of his self-image, there is also the germ of the project of the "post-Kantian culture", "philosophy without mirrors" and criticism of merely cognitive - and derived from Plato - paradigm of human activity (and from there there is only a step towards discussions of suffering, pain, novels, redescriptions, recontextualization, private/public etc. - as a matter of fact, the whole "turn" seems to me to be a change of rhetoric to the one culturally better understood). (shrink)

What I am trying to do in the present text is to draw a sketch of postwar French philosophy from the perspective of the question of relations between philosophy and politics. I am showing a distinction between the community and the text that is present in this philosophy from Sartre to Barthes to Foucault and beyond. The general passage from the community-oriented philosophy (which I call "Hegelian") to the text-oriented philosophy (which I call "Nietzschean") took place in the sixties, following (...) the books by Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Klossowski on Nietzsche. I am discussing the formulation of this opposition by Jean-Paul Sartre ("the aesthete"/"the engaged writer"), its reversal suggested by Roland Barthes ("authors"/"writers") and, finally, an attempt made by Michel Foucault to go beyond the very oppositions pertaining to "writing" as such in his dichotomy of "universal intellectuals"/"specific intellectuals". The passage from the French Hegel to the French Nietzsche as a "master thinker" in French philosphy was also a manifest passage from the community to the text as a main focus of philosophical interest, and the discussion of relations between philosophy and politics is at the same time that of the role, place, tasks and obligations of the philosopher in culture. The detour to these discussions is made in order to stress the continuity of the text/community (or Hegelian/Nietzschean) opposition in current debates on postmodernity and to ask about relations between philosophy and politics today. (shrink)

The paper links higher education reforms and welfare states reforms in postcommunist Central European countries. It links current higher education debates and public sector debates , stressing the importance of communist-era legacies in both areas. It refers to existing typologies of both higher education governance and welfare state regimes and concludes that the lack of the inclusion of Central Europe in any of them is a serious theoretical drawback in comparative social research. The region should still, after more than two (...) decades of transition and heavy international policy advising, be viewed as a “laboratory of social experimentation”. It is still too risky to suggest generalizations about how Central European higher education and welfare systems fit existing typologies. Consequently, the “transition” period is by no means over: it is over in terms of politics and economics but not in terms of social arrangements. Both higher education and welfare states should be viewed as “work in progress”: permanently under reform pressures, and with unclear future. (shrink)

The present book is devoted to "European connections of Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism". The theme, chosen carefully and intentionally, is supposed to show the motivation behind the writing of the present work, as well as to show its intended extent. Let us consider briefly the first three parts of the theme, to enlighten a little our intentions. ''European'1 is perhaps the most important description for it was precisely this thread that was most important to me, being the only context seriously taken (...) into account, as I assumed right from the start that I would not be writing about rather more widely unknown to me - and much less fascinating from my own, traditional, Continental philosophical perspective - American analytic philosophy. So accordingly I have almost totally skipped "American" connections of Rorty’s philosophy, that is to say, firstly, a years-long work within analytic philosophy, secondly struggles with it on its own grounds, and finally attempts to use classical American, mainly Deweyan, pragmatism for his own needs and numerous polemics associated with it- th e questions that are far away from my interests and that arise limited interest among reading and writing philosophical audience in Poland, and perhaps also among Continental philosophers. It did not seem possible to me to write a book on Rorty in his American connections for they are insufficiently known to me, demanding knowledge of both post-war American analytic philosophy as well as pragmatism of its father-founders. I could see, setting to work on Richard Rorty, that a book on his American connections written by a Polish philosopher in Poland and then in the USA was not a stimulating intellectual challenge but rather a thankless working task. (shrink)

There are several points of interest, several catchwords that evoke the whole complicated heart of the matter: Martin Heidegger in 1933 and later, Paul de Man in the years of 1940-42 and later (that "later" being no less important for the current discussions), Robert Faurisson and the whole group of histo- rians-"revisionists" of the Holocaust in France and in the USA in two recent decades. I would say the following: the material for the discussions that are of interest to me (...) today are the most traumatic events of the twentieth century and the behaviour of the philosopher, or in broader terms, the intellectual, associated with them. We can add to them Sartre’s conception of the "committed literature", Georges Bataille’s fascinations with the war, Maurice Blanchot’s fascist texts from the pre-war "Combat" journal, "maoist" involvements of the French intellectuals in the hot sixties, Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm with respect to the Iranian "spiritual revolution", Noam Chomsky’s (as well as Jean Beaufret’s) basically positive attitude to the "revisionists" who negate gassing in Auschwitz etc etc. If we add that all, we can see a certain complex of questions and issues the penetration of which may be one of today’s "tasks of thinking". (Leaving philosophers’ domain aside for a while, one can easily add to that constellation of questions, attitudes and behaviour e. g. Ezra Pound with his peculiar economy, Gottfried Benn, Knut Hamsun or Louis-Ferdinand Céline from "Bagatelles pour un massacre", not to mention our Polish fascinations, involvements, and commitments after the second world war.). (shrink)

The general context for this essay is the following: postmodern philosophy was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, especially in his postwar French readings from Bataille to Blanchot to Deleuze to Klossowski. It was Nietzsche in these readings who provided basic contours of a new self-image of the philosopher (or the humanist, more generally): instead of (modern) thinking about changing the social and political world, philosophers now found new terrains for thought. No longer associated with History, and less and less associated with (...) politics. From the perspective of this essay, it is interesting to think about philosophy through the lenses of the self-images philosophers (more or less consciously) assume. The transformation of the self-image of philosophers entails the gradual transformation of the role and place of philosophy in culture. For what is philosophy, in broadest terms - is what philosophers regard (regarded, or will regard) as accepted as philosophy. The passage from the Hegelian to the Nietzschean self-image in France in recent decades heralded the advent of postmodernity - if we accept the idea that what philosophers think about themselves while practicing philosophy is culturally significant. (shrink)

I would like to take into consideration in this text the possibility of Richard Rorty's evolution of views in terms of — suggested by him — distinction between the private and the public as well as in terms of his dichotomous pair of „solidarity" and „self-creation". My efforts would aim at showing that Rorty as a commentator on other philosophers is more and more inclined to value the significance of self-creational, developing one's „final vocabulary" way of philosophizing, while on the (...) other hand - as a philosopher himself he has remained, as far as the private sphere goes — in his own philosophizing — rather moderate and full of reserve. (shrink)

Let us begin our more detailed discussions with a rather general chapter that is an attempt to get close to Richard Rorty’s philosophical discourse on as broad a plane as possible and with a brief and introductory analysis of certain themes, questions and issues present in his recent books. Thus this will be a chapter not so much introducing to a wider context but rather introducing to Rorty’s thought itself. In the next chapters there will appear in the form of (...) more detailed analyses, reconstructions, redescriptions and readings some questions incidentally and generally put here in this chapter. The first volume of Rorty’s Philosophical Papers is devoted, for the most part, to the philosophers from the analytic circle, whereas the second to the figures and questions at the heart of which lie the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida and Foucault. It causes some noticeable tension between the two volumes but the links between them are created by "pragmatism" , strongly stressed and still clarified by Rorty. The first volume is shadowed mainly by one philosopher - Donald Davidson. Whereas when Rorty was writing his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the first and extremely influential book, he was strongly influenced, as he admits himself, by Wilfrid Sellars and W.v. O. Quine, during the next decade it was Donald Davidson that impressed him most and affected his philosophizing to the greatest extent. "I have been writing - explains Rorty - more and more about Davidson - trying to clarify his views to myself, to defend them against actual and possible objections, and to extend them into areas which Davidson himself has not yet explored". Also in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity - the book which seems to use the knowledge and experience of a multitude of texts from the collection of Philosophical Papers , and perhaps a crystallization of these articles - he sees Davidson as an absolutely crucial figure for his own considerations, especially those devoted to language, relations between language and reality, created truth rather than discovered one and so on. As is commonly known, Davidson is an antirepresentationalist and antiessentialist, he rejects the notion of language as some medium, as the third thing, intruding between the self and the reality. Knowledge, both to Rorty and to Davidson as well, is not a matter of getting reality right but rather a matter of "acquiring habits of action for copying with reality", as the former puts it. (shrink)

The fundamental questions to be addressed are these: What is the impact of "postmodernism" on the relationship between philosophy and science? What are the possible consequences of the postmodernist whirlwind on the status of philosophy in contemporary culture? And, does postmodernism add new questions to the gnawing issue over the degree, if any, to which a philosopher is a scientist? It would seem that the relationship between science and postmodern philosophy is a radically new one, not only because the place (...) of philosophy in culture is changing, but because the place of science in culture is undergoing a radical transformation as well. (shrink)

Richard Rorty’s approach to fiction results from its consistently - to use here his own opposition - "solidarity-related" account; the "other side", literary self-creation, remains programmatically and intentionally undiscussed with much seriousness. One can just get the impression that literature, and the novel in particular, has been burdened with heaviness of responsibility... Does in Rorty’s reflections the novel appear as a source of multifarious metaphors, of the whole worlds born out of the writer’s imagination? Is there in it another dimension (...) of the reality in which mundane obligations no longer bind the human being and where one can give rein to usually hidden desires and passions? The answer is in the negative. The world of fiction of which Richard Rorty writes is a pragmaticized one - and fiction itself is supposed first to build, and then to defend a democratic, liberal order as one of utopias feeding that order. On the other extreme, let us hasten to add, there is philosophy with its right to choose self-creation (the right given so willingly to these fragments of Derrida of which the most famous are perhaps the telecommunicational phantasies from The Post Card or quasi-polemics from Limited Inc.). The situation as outlined by Rorty might be described in the following manner: the writer has to be responsible (similar - although with a different ideal to - Sartre’s conception of littérature engagée), the philosopher may indulge in certain irresponsibility - or rather certain irrelevance with respect to social problems. It is as if "poets" are returned back to polis after more than twenty five centuries and made to think about the state and laws, relieving at the same time at least some philosophers from the respectful Platonic duty of "enlightening the darkness" of the world. In today’s intellectual climate it is probably easier to accept a new role for philosophers than to accept putting part of the burden of responsibility for the success of a contingent, like it or not, experiment of liberal democracies on the writer’s shoulders. Rorty thus seems to me to be making both one step forward and two steps backwards, as his pragmatism does not allow for leaving society at the mercy of spiritless technocrats, social engineers of the future, when poets and philosophers no longrr have much to say. (The opposite direction is taken by Jacques Derrida. He accords this "strange institution called literature", as he writes, the right of tout dire, of saying everything, the power of breaking away from existing rules and conventions, of questioning and dislocating them. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to provide a philosophical and historical background to current discussions about the changing relationships between the university and the state (and the university and society) through revisiting the classical “Humboldtian” model of the university. This historical detour is intended to show the cultural rootedness of the modern “idea of the university”, and its close links to the idea of the modern national state. The background is provided by the discussion of such German philosophers and (...) scholars as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich W.J. Schelling (the founding fathers of the University of Berlin) in the 19th century, as well as the controversy between Karl Jaspers and Jürgen Habermas in the 20th century. The paper consists of the following sections: the university and society: basic questions; the modern university, the nation-state, and “retrospective constructions; the three main principles of the Humboldtian university; the nationalization of European universities: serving the nation; the national aspect of the German Bildung; the pursuit of truth vs. public responsibilities of the modern university; the (foundational) idea of the university vs. its embodiments (the exposition of the Jaspers/Habermas controversy); the university and the state: a modern pact; the renewal of the university vs. the regeneration of the nation; knowledge for its own sake and Wilhelm von Humboldt; Humboldt‟s university vs. the “Humboldtian” university; the University of Berlin: new weapons to continue the struggle lost in the battleground; Humboldt and the role of Bildung; the rebirth of the German nation through education (Johann Gottlieb Fichte)?; giving birth to a new world and the Heideggerian overtones; the state, the university, and academic freedom (Friedrich Schleiermacher); philosophy and education (Friedrich W.J. Schelling); and conclusions. (shrink)

The university in the form we are familiar with - the modern university - derives from the intellectual work of German philosophers: from Kant and Fichte to Schleiermacher and Humboldt. Being a modem institution, it is relatively new and was bom together with the rise in national aspirations and the rise in the significance of Nation-States in the 19th century.A tacit deal made between power and knowledge, on the one hand, provided scholars with unprecedented institutional possibilities and, on the other, (...) obliged them to support national culture and to help with constituting national subjects - citizens of Nation-States. The alliance between modem knowledge and modern power gave rise to the foundations of the modem institution of the university. Both European, as well as American universities were either founded or transformed on the basis of the project written in 1808 by Wilhelm von Humboldt for the University of Berlin. The place, social function and role of the university as one of the most significant institutions of modernity were clearly determined. But currently, when the project of modernity undergoes radical transformations (toward late-modemity,or even postmodemity), it is no longer known what the exact place of the university in society is, for the society itself gets changed. (shrink)

The question of the place, role and tasks of philosophers in postmodernity is perplexing and complicated. I am going to talk here about French and American thinkers, but always having Central Europe in mind. And the question of the social, cultural and political status of philosophers in postmodernity is one of the most intriguing today, especially considering its self-referentiality: philosophers asking questions about themselves... Let us refer here first to several points of interest, several catchwords that evoke the whole complicated (...) heart of the matter: Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest philosophical minds in the twentieth century, with his Nazi illusions in 1933 and later, Paul de Man, the future founder of the American deconstructionist school of literary criticism, in the years of 1940-42 and later (that "later" being no less important for current discussions), the Historikerstreit in Germany among German historians and philosophers in the eighties. I would say the following: the material for the discussions that are of interest to me today are the most traumatic events of the twentieth century and the behavior of the philosopher, or in broader terms, the intellectual, associated with them. We can add to them Sartre's conception of the "committed literature", Georges Batai- lle's fascinations with the war, Maurice Blanchot's fascist texts from the prewar "Combat" journal, "Maoist" involvement of the French intellectuals in the hot sixties, Michel Foucault's enthusiasm with respect to the Iranian "spiritual revolution", Noam Chomsky's (as well as Jean Beaufret's) basically positive attitude to "revisionist" historians who negate gassing in Auschwitz etc. If we add that all, we can see a certain complex of questions and issues the penetration of which may be one of today's "tasks of thinking", one of organizing principles within philosophy of culture. (shrink)

I would like to take into consideration in this chapter the possibility of Richard Rorty's evolution of views in terms of - suggested by him - distinction between the private and the public as well as in terms of his dichotomous pair of "solidarity" and "self-creation". My efforts would aim at showing that Rorty as a commentator on other philosophers is more and more inclined to value the significance of a self-creational, developing one's "final vocabulary" way of philosophizing, while on (...) the other hand - as a philosopher himself he has remained as far as the private sphere goes - in his own philosophizing - rather moderate and full of reserve. Thus I would like to trace two roles possible in a philosophical language game - to have a look at Rorty’s account of particular philosophers as heroes of the philosophical tradition and to have a look at Rorty himself in the role of a philosopher in a traditional sense of the term, that is to say, interested in the so-called "philosophical problems, "eternal, perennial problems of philosophy", generally - a language game of Philosophy with a capital "p” . First, we would have to outline briefly the Rortyan sense of particular elements of the aforementioned dichotomies, explain a little the concepts from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that interest us in this chapter. Let us begin by saying that Rorty - distinguishing between writers of self-creation on the one hand and writers of solidarity on the other - advises us not to attempt to make choices between the two kinds, not to oppose the two camps and rather, as he puts it, to "give them equal weigh and then use them for different purposes". (shrink)

This book argues that the current renegotiation of the postwar social contract concerning the welfare state in Europe is being accompanied by the renegotiation of a smaller-scale modern social pact between the university and the nation-state. Current transformations to the state under the pressures of globalization will not leave the university unaffected, and consequently it is useful to discuss the university and its future in the context of the state. In the new global order, against the odds, universities are striving (...) to maintain their pivotal role in society. Their role as engines of economic growth and contributors to economic competitiveness between increasingly knowledge-driven economies is being widely acknowledged. But it is a radical reformulation of their traditional social roles. The main reasons for current transformations of the university include globalization pressures on nation-states and their public services, the end of the «Golden age» of the Keynesian welfare state, and the emergence of knowledge-based societies and knowledge-driven economies. Therefore the university can no longer be discussed solely in traditional, relatively self-contained disciplinary contexts. Here the university is seen from a variety of perspectives and through the lens of a wide range of disciplines (mainly educational sciences, political economy, sociology, political sciences, and philosophy). Contents Contents: The University in a Global Age - The University Between the State and the Market - The Idea of the University Revisited (the German Context) - The University and the Nation-State: the Impact of Global Pressures - The University and the Welfare State - Globalization, the Welfare State, and the Future of Democracy - The University and the New European Educational and Research Policies. (shrink)

Questions about the intellectual's place and role in society, his tasks and obligations, the status he ascribes to himself and that society ascribes to him have recently become a significant part of the ongoing discourse in the humanities. There are different reasons in different countries for this, but whether in English-speaking countries, in Germany or, especially, in France, questions about the intellectual have been important points of reference in numerous discussions at the end of the 20th century. Lepenies' thinking convincingly (...) shows that the dominating French discourse on the subject requires a significant supplement today, for it depicts merely a part of a larger whole which does not confine itself to France aloneFrench questions about the intellectual (from the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the 20th century to Sartre to, in turn, le silence des intellectuels in the eighties of the last century) do not exhaust the catalogue of all the questions that can and should be asked today; nor do they restrict our account of the issue of the intellectual to the adventure of being seduced by the Marxist (or Stalinist) thinking which started with the October Revolution of 1917 progressing to the middle of the seventies on the part of French writers and philosophers, followed only by their disappointment with and gradual distancing from it after the Algerian war of independence and the events of 1956 (for it is, indeed, possible to see the history of French intellectuals of the 20th century also from such a perspective); furthermore, these questions, heading mainly back through history - and mainly to that of the 20th century France - basically pass in silence the present and the future. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to provide a philosophical and historical background to current discussions about the changing relationships between the university and the state through revisiting the classical “Humboldtian” model of the university as discussed in classical German philosophy. This historical detour is intended to highlight the cultural rootedness of the modern idea of the university, and its close links to the idea of the modern national state. The paper discusses the idea of the university as it emerges (...) from the philosophy of Wilhelm von Humbold, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher, as well as - in the 20th century - Karl Jaspers and Jürgen Habermas. More detailed questions discussed include the historical pact between the modern university and the modern nation-state, the main principles of the Humboldtian university, the process of the nationalization of European universities, the national aspect of the German idea of culture (Bildung), and the tension between the pursuit of truth and public responsibilities of the modern university. In discussing current and future missions and roles of the institution of the university today, it can be useful to revisit its foundational (modern) German idea. In thinking about its future, it can be constructive to reflect on the evident current tensions between traditional modern expectations of the university and the new expectations intensified by the emergence of knowledge-based societies and market-driven economies. From the perspective of the tensions between old and new tasks of the university, it is useful to look back at the turning point in its history. (shrink)

Book synopsis This book is devoted to the condition of the university under the pressures of globalization, with particular reference to Central Europe. It is intended as a companion volume for all those who combine their academic and disciplinary research with wider interests in the functioning of higher education institutions under the new pressures affecting Central Europe. Drawing on its interdisciplinary nature and the wide range of scholars involved, it intends to outline a useful map of new, often challenging, areas, (...) topics and concerns to be taken into account in rethinking the function of the university today. -/- Contents Contents: Philip G. Altbach: Academic Freedom: International Realities and Challenges - Richard Rorty: Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions? - Stanley N. Katz: Can Liberal Education Cope? - Marek Kwiek: The State, the Market, and Higher Education. Challenges for the New Century - Roger Deacon/Ben Parker: The Schooling of Citizens, or the Civilizing of Society? - Tadeusz Buksinski: The University and Learning in a Situation of Depression - Martin Jay: The Menace of Consilience: Keeping the Disciplines Unreconciled - Voldemar Tomusk: Towards a Model of Higher Education Reform in Central and East Europe - Wolf Lepenies: Im Osten viel Neues. Wissenschafts- und Kulturpolitik für Europa - Zbigniew Drozdowicz: Academic Accreditation: a Polish Case Study - Marek Kwiek: The Nation-State, Globalization and the Modern Institution of the University. (shrink)